Thursday, March 29, 2012

Over time I’ve written a couple of tools to ease the headaches that sometimes comes from running a couple of TFS servers. Most of them I just hacked together to get a working state, command line tool. Once the problem was solved I simply backed up the source, and went on with the next problem. This has not been a good approach for long run reuse and efficiency.

Collected and published as a Visual Studio add-in
This time then I needed some of the tools, I decided to put a little more effort into it and try to collect the different tool in a collection, build some basic UI and publish them as a Visual Studio Add-In. I will try to pick and hopefully convert the tools and add them to the toolkit as I find the needs for them.

First of: Update Reports and Work Item types for a team project collection
I actually started already, by converting two tools used to do batch updates of already created team projects. It can be quite a work to update a number of team projects with new features developed such as reports or Work Item Types customizations. With the TFS Administrators toolkit you can simply do it with a couple of clicks, and sit down and enjoy while the tools updates the selected team projects for you.
You will find the TFS Administrators Toolkit Visual Studio Add-in on Visual Studio Gallery http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/11f5e313-ced1-4713-9794-d7300c7d12e0

Thursday, March 15, 2012

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a new Visual Studio Add-In I’ve started to work on. Thegood news is that the add-in is now feature complete, at least for the intended feature set for the first release. So far it’s undergone a limited amount of testing by a handful brave persons.

Current feature setOnce installed, the Iteration Manager add-in adds a new menu item to the Team Project menu in team explorer. From there you can access the Iteration Manager for the selected team project and select the operation you want to use.Iteration manager feature setUnder the Iteration Manager menu you will find this menu to access the different operations Iteration Manager can assist you with.

New Iteration The new iteration operations assist you in creating iterations. It can assist you with the following:• Create the Iteration Node• Create a Sprint work item and set iteration and dates.• Create a new Iteration query folder, by copying a template query folder, and edit all queries to select your new iteration.

The different options will be dependent on your process template and your configurations.

Change current iteration The Change Current Iteration operations assist you in changing the current iteration in your team project by editing and changing the iteration filter for all queries in your Current sprint folder.

Configure Iteration ManagerThe Configure Iteration Manager options is a place there you hopefully don’t need to go to change anything if your running any of the common process templates. If you made customizations to your team project, or have any other needs, you can configure the different actions the iteration manager performs in the other operations.